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This paper examines the divergent trajectories of automotive investment and employment in Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario. Located on opposite shores of the Detroit River, in the United States and Canada respectively, Detroit and Windsor are the founding cities of the North American auto industry. Long dominated by the Big Three, their factories have produced vehicles for the same continental market since 1965. Each has weathered parallel challenges since then, including spikes in the price of oil, the Big Three's loss of market share, the transition to lean production, and the near-collapses of Chrysler and GM. Yet Detroit began deindustrializing decades earlier and lost much more employment than Windsor. To determine why, we compared their automotive sectors from 1900 to the 2010s. Since the Depression, each city has repeatedly confronted the prospect of deindustrialization, but three factors have made Windsor more resilient: (1) federal and provincial interventions on its behalf, (2) Windsor's greater competitiveness with respect to factor costs, quality, and innovation, and (3) Windsor's annexation of outlying territory to capture new factories. These differences show how national, subnational, and regional/local policies have mediated corporate decision-making to produce a variegated North American Rust Belt, with Canada outperforming the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a step in identifying a more accurate economic history of deindustrialization. Following the extension of the timeline of deindustrialization and its divorce from the 1970s, this article examines the reasons for production facility relocation our of Detroit, prior to the 1970s. Given that the process of deindustrialization occurred prior to 1970, the reasons must be reevaluated. To this end, this article examines one of the lesser investigated reasons that auto corporations moved their production facilities out of Detroit; organized labor. It shows that organized labor was one of the driving factors of production facility relocation. This article makes use of multiple collections housed in the Reuther Archives at Wayne State University in relation to organized labor, as well as union density data. This article details how and why production facilities were pushed out of Detroit in an effort to evade organized labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1930s, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) used a process called redlining to section off districts in an attempt to signal the level of risk to lenders. Consequently, lenders felt justified in turning away non-white borrowers, effectively leading to segregated communities. This practice carried on through the mid-1960s, after which some communities underwent socio-demographic transformations due to gentrification, urban renewal, and deindustrialization, amongst other things. This paper analyzes the current demographic trends in Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles to determine to what extent the resulting segregation from redlining practices has persisted. Redlining and census data from 1930 and 2020 were obtained and analyzed in order to compare the racial demographics over time. White vs. non-white population in redline districts in 1930 versus 2020 were compared in each of these cities. Whereas percent change between white majority and non-white minority provides a demographic trend over time, a local spatial autocorrelation (LISA) analysis helped to identify dense areas of minority population. Lastly, the index dissimilarity, interaction, and isolation were used to better expose persistent levels of segregation. This research provides one example of how historical GIS analysis can be done using diverse datasets to show spatio-temporal patterns of importance to ongoing issues of social justice and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the tangible and documented impact race plays in questions of housing, employment, education, and health, discourses of antiracialism perpetuate the idea race—and by extension, racism—is no longer a relevant marker of disparity. In this alleged “post race” context, how do news accounts cover stories on urban crisis and renewal? This article takes up scholarly calls to develop “conceptual tools” that may enable critical scholars to explore how racism continues undercover in the 21st century. I argue for the importance of exploring how strategic forgetting operates in conjunction with the familiar and formulaic frame of personalization to erase or evade the continued presence of structured, systemic racism in the (re)construction/renewal of city spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of Detroit's deindustrialization is intimately connected to the long dislocation in the auto industry. This article highlights how the spatial fixes endemic to capital determined the parameters of that deindustrialization through several key moments. In particular, the role of black autoworkers and Detroit residents contending with such spatial fixes will be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detroit’s perceived social and industrial degeneration has been matched by an unfortunate aesthetic appreciation for the image of urban ruination. Detroit, and other cities experiencing economic disinvestment, have become the inanimate models for a documentary and artistic mode of photography that fetishizes scenes of urban decline and abandonment. Such cities and urban spaces have become real-life stand-ins for the apocalyptic imagination already nurtured in broader arts and media. The fascination with the ruins of contemporary culture and the proliferation of what is sometimes referred to as “ruin porn” photography, point toward Susan Sontag’s cautious warning about the photographer’s complicity in retaining the photographed object’s state of being. Drawing on Sontag’s suspicions of photography, I offer a critique of the function and meaning of ruin photography. I draw on both Sontag’s and Roland Barthes’s cautions about the interpretive function of the photograph in terms of the act of photographing the object as well as the meaning that the photograph proposes. Using this framework, I consider the recent conceptualizations of ruin, particularly the industrial ruin, as ambivalent and multifaceted. I question whether this multidimensionality is evident in the ruin photography of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre and others, the urban exploration photography of Detroiturbex, and the documentary film Deptropia. I suggest that the photographer’s fascination with places of ruin carries out the double act of fixing such places firmly in a particular melancholic moment and equally fixes any potential meaning potentially represented in such imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The narrative of the 'fall'-an account by urban residents about a decline in the morality and aesthetics of their surroundings-is common in US urban studies. Researchers typically explain the 'fall' as an outcome of post-Fordist changes in urban resources, neglecting to explore the social construction of this sense of things. Analyzing the oral histories of people who were born in Detroit from the 1920s to the 1970s, the author considers three explanations for the persistence of this narrative: constant urban decline, a moralizing hegemony or doxa, and a clash between objective structures and embodied histories over the life course. This line of inquiry is relevant to concerns about the impact of structural crises on social consciousness, and it is of particular significance to the theorization of the politics of place in post-Fordist cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]